Contents | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3
A&R, or Artists & Repertoire, was the one unchanging component of the music industry. Transformation swept through every other facet of music, from the production to the performers and their instruments. Change hit distribution and consumption, too. But not A&R. They were the people behind the performers, the sentinels of spend. They stood still, duty unchanging as ages and genres swirled around them. Almost two centuries ago, they watched blues give birth to rock. Decades later, they watched as synthesisers and electronic music spawned new genres. They had a hand in compact discs, tapes, and streaming. They fretted over torrents and the bite they took out of their profits. And, as AI became more powerful, they relied on it to remake and remaster and, eventually, to resurrect dead artists.
Their priority was profit, never art. The artists were simply property. It took audiences time to adapt to live shows starring the long-dead. Over time, though, it wasn’t unusual to see The Beatles or Run DMC perform, even if they hadn’t drawn breath for a century or more. Of course, new music was always required. Taste, fashion and society were always in flux, so the soundtrack had to be, too. There was money in nostalgia but more in novelty. The progress of AI from reinforcement learning and neural networks to something more neuromorphic and bio-mimetic only yielded incremental change. Thought still eluded the planet-spanning computers. They required exaflops of data and mega-watts of power just to emulate cognition. The true imitation game Turing had hypothesised was tantalisingly close but still beyond grasp. The proximity of this technology was something that had kept bobbing in and out of the entertainment zeitgeist. With each reappearance, it seemed more destined to become true.
When Shay started busking, the wave was peaking. AI had arrived. Again. On a frigid winter day on Buchanan Street in Glasgow, with her guitar in her freezing cold hands and her breath fogging in front of her with each lyric, she didn’t care. How often had she been reminded ‘there’s no future in that game’, ‘more people fail than succeed’ and ‘your chances of being signed are a million-to-one’.
But she hadn’t cared. She sang in the street and the student unions and even toured some pubs. She wrote and performed her songs simply because that was what she had to do. It was within her and had to be expressed. The busking began in the depths of a Glasgow winter; she decided to take a spot on Buchanan Street, serenading shoppers and pub crawlers to see how she’d get on. Her PhD in biomechanical interfaces was progressing well, and the music offered her a release from the pressure of that life. Academia was the preserve of her father, and she followed. She was good at it but had little passion for it all. It was a fallback after she had fallen forward into science and biology, following her father. She would play the numbers game. Probabilities. Sure, music was hardly a stable or guaranteed career, but it was the career she wanted. If it didn’t work out? Well, she had something else behind her.
“If I don’t try, then I’ll regret it forever,” she told her father, her brother and anyone else who questioned her.
Try was what she did for almost a decade. In that time, she had gone from pubs and cold city centre streets to stadium tours and adulation in warmer climes. She became Shay Laren, opting to follow the neo-feminist convention of removing the ‘Mc’ or son of portion from her surname.
“It’s only a stage name,” she reassured Ben, who didn’t seem pleased with the corruption of the family name, his patronymic.
She worked hard on her music. Harder than on the PhD. Her rise had been meteoric, and her band unchanged from her university days: Heather, Jon, Jambo and Lonny: Shay Laren and The Kytes.
She was the star power, and they all knew it.
Especially A&R.
One balmy afternoon in a Glastonbury field, Shay stood on a black stage, the sun mid-afternoon high, the air hot and humid, and the crowd chanting. They were chanting her lyrics. A sea of faces swayed like crops in a breeze. Her breeze. Lonny’s drums were building to the chorus of Interpolated. This was the single from their new album, which had smashed platinum globally in under six months. Then Heather’s guitar squealed. A tone change marked by Jambo joining with a lone note on the bass. And then the hook.
Perfect.
Shay counted in, the pressure building, the crowd chanting, the heat haze rising from the speaker stacks with renewed vigour. The whole place vibrated: the scaffold stage, the booms, the lighting rigs, the floor panels—the earth. More than two hundred thousand feet stomped out the tune Shay had written, something she’d idly hummed to herself years ago, a pattern now cast in lyrics and notes. Then she sang, and something close to ecstasy grabbed her. Enough people to fill a small city were singing her words back to her. She had never felt so complete, so rapt. She was further from sad than she had ever dreamt possible, closer to a religious experience than she dared believe viable. She clapped and swayed to a rhythm she had devised, arranged and composed.
Lost in it.
An army of human beings of all types and stripes copied her, equally entranced. They beamed her own material back to her, having paid for the privilege, suffering through the heat, mud, sweat and fog of overpriced alcohol. All seemingly just to reaffirm to her this is what she truly wanted.
This was love. This was divine.
And behind her, always, were the A&R people. Watching, measuring and accounting. They were friends, at first, encouraging, part of the process, threads entwined with the purse strings. But soon, they felt like weights around Shay’s limbs. The bigger the audience, the greater the weight. Suggestions became mandates. The greater the profit, the greater the interference. Increasingly, they told her how to look, sound and come across. Marketing spend was chief among their concerns, with touring costs secondary. And her? A very distant tertiary.
One teary night, exhausted after a run of four back-to-back shows, she confided in her brother via video call.
“My A&R people are open-air plotters. Corporate sharks, all teeth, happy or sad, smiling when devouring or devotional. I’m so sick of them, Craig.”
He was her brother, unsympathetic as usual, finding it hard to parse Shay and her emotions from the privilege of a five-star beach hotel and a sold-out stadium tour. Shay was alone, bereft of the trappings of normality. Craig drowned in it as he sat in his cramped Queens apartment, fed a truculent toddler, worried about bills, and dreaded work the following day. They lived in different universes. He had his wife, Jill, to be there. To listen to his problems and provide support. Shay only had the distant lights of Rio de Janeiro and a passive-aggressive, holo-displayed brother.
Where had the boy she knew gone? He seemed adrift in the murky waters of his messy middle years. All around him, the pollution of politics from his party affiliation and the wreckage of relationships past. Resentment wrapped around his feet and legs, leaving him unable or unwilling to swim towards a life less burdened by the past, by pride. The holo fading on their call was a metaphor for a relationship that had once been everything to Shay.
Pre and post-procedure.
The show, however, must go on, and soon, the A&R people were saccharine sweetness again, temporarily buoyed by sales and profits from a new EP. Shay lived, for now, in the credit column. She and her band brought home cash earned with honesty, wit, and the chords she struck with audiences. She was many things to a happily paying audience: a beautiful, down-to-earth canvas to project desire onto. She was a marketer’s dream, protestant in work ethic and devoid of vice.
But she was naive to the nature of the beast who carried her on its back.
The first sign of her status as a product rather than a performer had come months after Glastonbury. Her embracing of the crowd there, luxuriating in such rapture, had scored some negative points in the macro-analyses. The footage of the show reached more souls than she had previously. The scrutiny of her, which had always been milimetric, was now nanoscopic. A&R’s metronome was the macro-analyses. They gleaned it from devices scanning a globe full of retinas, capillary and ECG responses. Until now, the metronome had beaten regularly.
Post-tour, Shay had taken off to travel America for leisure, opting to visit her home country for the first time in over a decade. She assiduously avoided New York and its jarring associations with pre-procedure Shay. She was also avoiding Craig. She opted to travel “off-grid”, driving across the great nation’s contiguous states in her own company, decidedly unreachable. This had allowed sufficient panic to build in A&R, resulting in many meetings and conversations, all with creative conclusions she was less than receptive to upon her return.
“No fucking way. Are you serious?” Shay said, staring down the screen at Lonny, her longtime drummer. She was only back an hour, fresh from the hypersonic from LA. Lonny swept frizzy blond hair from his resigned eyes.
“Yeah, well, the label was pretty explicit about it, so that’s that for me, pal,” he said, sighing and deflating. She had known him since her first PhD year at university—Lonny fae Denny.
“I’ll talk to them, get Henrik De Jong or somebody, and see exactly what is happening. He can’t break up the band,” said Shay.
But she was not to repay Lonny’s hopeful gaze. Henrik, their A&R guy, reassured her that things would be fine and that, “Lonny, he does not, hmmm, test so good in the macros, you know darling, post-Glasto.”
The fucking macros?!?
When Shay threatened to quit the band, clauses were recited to her from the official contract displayed on the video holo, scrolling alongside the face of James Martin, head of A&R. The presentation had been pre-prepared. The counter retaliation locked into the response to Shay’s inevitable reaction. Lonny was the first domino to fall through no fault of Shay’s. And not the last, either.
Returning from America, Shay locked herself in the studio, determined to finish the last album she was contractually obliged to give the label. She wrote to clarify her feelings. To capture her loss and hurt. To put a yoke on her anger and have it pull her towards catharsis.
She had opted for only ten tracks. The number appealed to her with its rounded sturdiness: the bare minimum the contract specified but also the most optimal number. The most orderly number. Somewhere, deep in the gloom beneath consciousness, the thing pulling the strings, the true her, the pre-procedure Shay, craved order. It demanded that all be sure, stable and predictable. That Shay swam beneath everything she considered to be the post-procedure her. And that Shay, the child she had been, was always there, sometimes with her face to the transparent floor of post-procedure consciousness. Shay dedicated this last album to her, choosing the number for its multi-layered significance – a significance not lost on her primal, atavistic and trapped core.
Writing was hard without Lonny. It got harder without Heather, Jon and Jambo. The brickwork had lost its mortar, and the edifice once known as Shay Laren and the Kytes crumbled, leaving Shay McLaren buried in the rubble. Her friends were gone, her band disbanded. So she wrote of loss, sang of sorrow and played melancholic chords, reproducing them on piano, guitar, and in beat notation—an ode to order for the thing trapped inside her.
The label had spoken of using AI to re-create the band members. They were, after all, “not the motive force behind Shay Laren, are they?”
Henrik de Jong told her this, one lonely Saturday evening at her London studio. The cheap bastards didn’t even spring for Abbey Road as I’d requested.
“Two centuries of training data can be used, all royalty-free, because why pay royalties to IP and products, after all?” Henrik said, giggling down the phone.
She knew this conversation wasn’t meant for her. Henrik was sat in a recording booth, feet up on the auto-production desk. He likely chose the empty recording booth for its soundproofing, not realising the microphones were still on. Shay was on her way to get lunch in the corridor by the yawning double doors to that studio. She paused, peering through the doors to the back of his head. He was talking to a holo-projected face.
“I mean, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles don’t need to draw breath to compose music; Elvis need not have hips to gyrate. It’s a brave new fucking world, Henrik. The tech out there, man, you should see the shit they’re doing, I tell ya,” said the holo face.
Shay poked her head a little further into the studio but couldn’t make out who Henrik was speaking to.
“Ya,” said Henrik, “We have a stable of stars, a catalogue of sounds and the like, but we have to be careful not to wring all the juice from our dead IP donors.”
“Totally. You know this new biomorphic shit, though, fifth-gen stuff, like proper fucking neurons or some shit. Well it can write like a human, no uncanny valley to fall into. No dealing with these prima donnas in rehab, on a comedown, in a courtroom or in flagrante, you know what I’m saying? Total compliance”
Henrik laughed, “Ya, I know. Bright future, though. Sampling for the new age, my friend.”
Shay’s heart sank, and she skulked back to the studio she was using. She had heard enough and refused to hear more.
Just hot air.
She could console herself with that. What machine had managed to write a diamond album so far? She muddled on, driven by concealed anger. She would have said flow if she was pressed for a verb to describe this mind state. Things came to her, fragments for rapid assembly into a greater whole. Things just flowed.
And A&R was a dam. A valve turned to OFF.
At first, the presence of her A&R man, Henrik De Jong, was subtle: a speck of dust on her glasses. But he grew to become an eyepatch. As studio spend increased, so did his input.
“The sound, well, it has to be more poppy, you know?” said Henrik.
She did not know. Poppy, as in the flowers? Poppy, as in, more pop-like?
Who last used pop to describe anything?
She had been playing the guitar in the booth, working on one of the many intractable problems artists encounter—a rhythmical analogue of writer’s block. The sound just needed something. But what? And in burst Henrik, large, bulky and uncompromising in tone, manner and campness.
“Oh darling, you know what I mean,” he said, all kind smile and evil eyes, “like from the early 2000s, that driving, well, how to say…”
He scratched his jowls, looking around the studio. It was a mess. Holo waveforms floated above litter-strewn consoles. Chocolate wrappers fought with empty glasses and crisp packets for tabletop real estate. Instrument pads and paper notepads congested the coffee table. The auto-producer desk hosted an assembly of bottles, cans and tissues. Henrik surveyed this and wrinkled his nose.
“Perhaps,” he continued, snapping his fingers for emphasis, eyes back on Shay, “More like Britney, more like some playful thing, you know? Take inspiration from then, that period. A kind of retro callback; audiences love that. Turn of the last century, you know, the aesthetic I mean. Blue skies, love troubles, the cheap-looking clothes. Use the back catalogue if you have to”
Shay slumped on the studio couch, acoustic guitar in her arms more for comfort than productivity. She looked more drained than if Dracula had been at her neck. She sighed, not following Henrik or his notes. This had been his fourth visit in as many days. His welcome was more worn out than a furiously wheel-spun tyre.
“So you want me to emulate Britney Spears?” she said.
Henrik shook his be-jowled head, “No darling, that style, the playful tone, you know? The optimism of another age, a pastiche of such style, innocent, with a hint and a wink, you know? Make the audience feel good, not down. You know what I mean?”
Naw, ah don’t fuckin know, arsehole.
At times like this, when the ideas man so perturbed the flow, Shay did the only thing she could do. She strummed the guitar, something resembling a happy-go-lucky sequence of chords for the portly producer to listen to and opine upon. She would then assiduously assure that whatever she played never went near a recording. Not that she considered Henrik to have much of an ear for anything other than the tone his phone made when he got paid. After a few more iterations, Henrik seemed satisfied. The auto-producer began to take chords and morph them into a style wall. The colour-coded squares of the style wall represented sequences, riffs, hooks and other disassembled components of a song. The EQ window was an interpolated holo drifting amongst the squares. Shay stabbed at a few of them to replay rushes for Henrik. He nodded, narrowed his eyes and issued a humourless smile.
“Progress, I believe. I’ll take my leave, darling,” said Henrik.
He paused by the door, still wearing his insincere smile.
“Ready for tonight?” he said.
What was tonight? Shay’s face conveyed the question.
“The Atlantica launch party, darling, going to be plenty of important people there. Will do you the world of good to get out of,” he paused, wrinkling his nose again and pointed around the studio, “this.”
“Since when did I go to these things, Henrik? I’m too bloody busy. You never mentioned this to me before,” said Shay.
“Check your phone; the invite was sent a while ago,” Henrik said.
He hovered by the door, fiddling with what looked like a handbag. He opened it and rummaged for his own device, not finding it. He sighed and tapped his temple. A holo sphere projected out from behind his ear, and Shay could see his eyes dart back and forth along lines of text visible only to him.
Of course, this wanker has a caster.
“Resend that invitation to Shay Laren, please,” said Henrik. He snapped a finger in his eyeline, and the holo sphere vanished, the caster switching off.
“Check your phone. Deets sent. Ciao ciao!”
And with that, he was gone.
Atlantica?
Shay would sooner slit her wrists in a vinegar bath than attend a party to toast the latest revival of the girl group.
To her mind, she was more than tits, arse and an auto-tuned voice. Her fine ebony features were a gift from her parents, her physical attributes an inherent part of her adult form but not the reason she was appreciated. People came for her voice, to hear her talent expressed in her work and the music she made. Some engaged with the melodies, harmonies or feel. Others with the ideas Shay infused her sound with. Her music was a vehicle to convey her feelings, to sing about the pain and joy of life, and to begin maybe to answer the question of who and just precisely what she was.
Atlantica though?
They were just tits and arses and auto-tuned voices, processed to purge complexity and soul. Their music was a product, a distillation of basic, broad ideas. They sang about love in the abstract, of relationship problems in general. Indeed, of everything in general. A one-size-fits-all, impersonal, broad-spectrum blandness. The music was as honest as unregulated marketing.
Perhaps an AI could just design some banal comic book woman, exploding from a spandex outfit, happy to endlessly gyrate to AI-created synth-shit at 125BPM. The type of stuff that blared in the clubs Shay would never visit and have dances made to by drunk women who trotted round their handbags on suicide heels.
She knew this was a snobby thought, conceited, perhaps even elitist, but it was how she felt. Pure, unadulterated disdain. Atlantica and their ilk were audio fast food, cheap, unearned emotion. Her antithesis and the very thing Henrik had instructed her to be more like. Her phone chirped from the table, and Shay swiped her hand through the upward projected holo of Henrik’s smiling visage.
“Yeah,” she said, thankful it was voice only. She did not have much of a poker face.
“I’m sending the details of your outfit for this evening, and also, we have arranged a plus one for you, so don’t bring anyone. Ciao ciao!”